Newhere and Gil, thanks for asking, but no news yet. My local doctor is doing the authorization dance with the insurance company. That may take a few weeks. I look forward to what the ESI shows, but there is other news.
I'm in the Netherlands now, but just spent the weekend with Dr. Baumbach in Munich. He is amazing and every time I see him I learn a ton. Unfortunately, it was too much work and spine... not enough hiking.
Dr. Baumbach recently had an experience with a patient that made him think of my case. The patient is post single-level cervical ADR with a pain pattern similar to mine. She has similar thoracic pain, wrap-around chest pain and sternum pain. This is a common pattern of referred cervical pain. In this patient, other scans did not show relevant pathology, but a 3 tesla MRI clearly showed a substantail bulge at a level adjacent to the ADR.
Our discussion about the reasons we are only looking thoracic was very interesting. After the onset of the thoracic pain, I had a large panel of facet injections from T2 down to T8. This was positive, so we thought this isolated the operated c-spine above from the thoracic pain and narrowed it down to the the t-spine. I have no problem with the choices we've made during this process... we were methodical, only doing low-risk procedures and we only acted on clear results (as with the positive costo-vertebral joint injections, followed by more targeted injections, followed by the ablations.) However, I have since come to suspect the large panels of injections because I believe that there is a cumulative value to the injections. So much local and steriod coming from 6, 8, 10, 12 injections at once may very well generate false positives.
Note that we were also thrown by the presence of a very clear disc herniation in the area that I have the pain. (Baumbach believes that while this is not likely a pain generator, it is substantial enough to cause myelopathy.)
I will follow through with the ESI and acupuncture when I get home (unless I experience a miracle before then.) But on Baumbach's advice, I will have a 3-Tesla MRI. I'll be at the BetaKlinik on Thursday anyway and they have the most state of the art MRI equipment availalble there. (Open 3-T. When I was here a year ago, it was the only open 3-T in Germany. I don't know if that is still true.)
So the old news is not ESI yet... still in the works. But new information causes me to look cervical and have the 3T MRI.
I'll keep you all posted... All the best,
Mark